RTÉ television’s ‘Prime Time’ investigation of conditions in the emergency department at University Hospital Limerick (UHL) has drawn an apology to patients from hospital management.
A whistleblower quoted in last Monday night’s programme described conditions there as “absolute hell”.
The source revealed how nurses and doctors at the emergency department are seeing “an average of 220 patients per day”.
The hospital’s capacity for safe numbers of trolleys in the emergency department is 36, but the department regularly has in excess of that number with 54 waiting on one day recently.
In a statement on behalf of the hospital following the programme, a spokesperson said that it has been ” long acknowledged that the emergency department at UHL is simply too small for the volumes of patients attending and is not fit-for-purpose. The emergency department is one of the busiest in the country with approximately 60,000 attendances annually.
“A new emergency department, that will triple the size of the current department, is currently being fitted out and will open in the first quarter of 2017. However, UL Hospitals has implemented a range of interim measures to reduce the number of patients waiting for admission and the length of time they wait”.
The measures introduced include increasing bed capacity at UHL by more than 40 beds in the last two months; hiring additional staff; additional ward rounds to facilitate earlier discharge or transfer where appropriate; securing funding to open a specialist facility for elderly patients at St John’s Hospital, Limerick; postponing non-urgent elective surgery if necessary and closer co-operation with the community healthcare organisation.
The hospital spokesperson said that in spite of the measures taken, “the emergency department has remained under pressure since last December owing to the high volumes of patients presenting, in particular frail elderly patients, and seasonal factors such as influenza”.
“Nationally, the influenza-like illness (ILI) consultation rate per 100,000 of the population has increased steadily since January of this year. And the ILI consultation rate per 100,000 in the MidWest was by far the highest in the country – double the national rate – for the week ending February 7, 2016, the week during which the footage for Prime Time was filmed.
“High incidence of flu in the community is reflected in the hospital population and this puts additional pressure on bed management”.
“UL Hospitals would like to apologise to any patient who has faced long waits during this busy period and is making every effort to minimise the numbers waiting and the length of time they wait,” the statement concluded.
